Tanktics Press Release (1998)

27.06.2016
mjhardisty
0

News Release SP1.0

Tanktics: A Strategy Game Without the Zzzzzz…

Pushing strategy gaming into the 21st century Gremlin Interactive presents Tanktics, from DMA Design on PC and PlayStation, the fastest, most original strategy game in the history of the world. Ever! (And we’re not messing).

Like a few others, the object of the game is to lay waste unto thine enemies, destroying their forces, annihilating their base and generally making life unpleasant in a number of creative ways. To achieve world domination you must take control of a heavy-duty, anti-gravity crane. Your crane is quite the most useful piece of hardware since the combined corkscrew and bottle opener was invented. It hovers above a huge 3-Dimensional SVGA polygon landscape. The landscape has been modeled to feature grassy plains, rocky mountains, lakes, lava, quicksand, forests, snow, ice and, of course, sheep! The sheep are important. The crane is controlled with the mouse and swoops and races across the landscape at speeds in excess of very fast. Each crane has a magnet that lets you manipulate, pick up, assemble and control your forces. And what forces do you manipulate? Well, check the name. You don’t think we’d come up with a pun like that without actually featuring tanks…

Tanktics oddly enough, features a lot of tanks. The player’s job is to construct a number of tanks and use these to seek, destroy and make life unpleasant for other people. Every tank in the game is modular, with tracks, engine blocks, weapons and radar control dishes that can be fitted together in different configurations.

Start off with a set of tracks. The player begins the game with a few assorted tank parts and a magical machine which we call the Part-O-Matic™.

In order to create the tank parts, your Party-O-Matic needs a supply of resources. Yes, yes, I know what you’re thinking, but in Tanktics there are no ‘Harvesters’, ‘valuable minerals’ or ore with a stupid name. The Part-O-Matic can use pretty much anything on the landscape – tank parts (yours or the enemies), boulders, sheep… Once started, the Part-O-Matic™ spits out bits and pieces of tanks in a never ending stream of death and destruction. Using your crane’s magnet or grabbers you pick up a likely looking set of tracks and drop them somewhere safe. Now you need an engine block or two.

The more engines you fit to your tank, the faster it will be. You grab an engine block and take it back to the tracks. Hovering above the tracks you release the engine. Wheeeeeee! Splat! it goes, as it bonds firmly with the tracks. You haven’t even marveled at the lovingly crafted ‘splat’ animation since you’re already racing back to the Part-O-Matic in search of more parts. Another engine block – another splat! But, careful now! You can put together a maximum of ten parts of tank so, perhaps now you might like to go and look for some nice weapons. The Part-O-Matic has already coughed out a huge sinister looking gun that looks like it shoots bullets the size of office blocks. “Neat!” you cry excitedly and charge forward, but your companions and playmates have also spotted the gun that we like to call ‘Mr. Eviscerator’. You all charge into the fray, magnets a-buzzing…

Once you’ve built tanks to your taste you’ve got to drop a radar dish onto the top of each tank in order to activate it. An exciting feature is the fact that whoever drops a dish onto a tank, controls that tank. Imagine the surprise on your friends faces when you swish into their base, drop a radar dish on a HUGE battle tank that they’ve spent 10 minutes constructing and then blast lumps out of him/her.

Of course, the way you construct your tanks affects how you will be able to play the game. A dozen huge ferocious tanks will be able to chew their way through almost any obstacle but a couple of tanks composed of nothing but engines might be able to steal your flag and be off on their tracks before your monsters know what’s happening.

With over 70 unique weapons within the game the choices are huge…

A Strategy Game 65 Million Years in the making

Tanktics features four distinctive Eras for the player to try. Stone-age features huge tanks carved out of massive chunks of granite. Slow movers but don’t let them get too close. Medieval tanks are constructed like castles. Stone and wood with all of the heraldry and frilly bits. Modern tanks are mean no-nonsense cold-war chunks o’ metal, sinister and deadly. While the future tanks have cool options like hovering and long-range weapons that Darth Vader would chew his sons remaining arm off for.

Each era contains enough tank parts to offer over 2 Million possible combinations of tank. Enough to keep even the saddest strategy freaks (i.e. us) happy for an amazing amount of time. When you combine the different eras in a single or multi-player game, where you can mix and match components from different eras, the number of different tank combination rises to approximately 3×1011. That’s a lot of Tanks.

The eras have all been modeled so that no one era has a particular advantage over another era. The Future tanks will have a hard time beating the Stone-Age tanks and we love it that way.

You Can Change The Laws of Physics

But why would you want to? Tanktics has been modeled with an amazing amount of detail. A lot of effort has gone into accurately modeling the physical world of the game. The magnetic attraction and repulsion of the cranes has been modeled superbly. The inertia, momentum and movement of the crane while carrying a weight has been hand-crafted by experts.

Tanktics also features full interaction with the various elements found within the game. Tanks and tank parts that end up in water will become water-logged and heavy. Wooden tanks that come into contact with fire or lava can catch fire and burn. Fire spreads from one tank to anther until you can send them into a lake or an area covered in snow.

Tanktics is set to redefine the standard for strategy games. The speed and detail of the game has to be seen to be believed (honestly – I weep when I see it). Tanktics also has a feature that has been overlooked and ignored in the majority of strategy games for far too long – humor. Yes, we’ve created a fast, slick, funny game that loses none of the strategy elements. With it’s unique control and gameplay elements and superb graphics Tanktics is gonna be the biggest strategy game – ever.

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